Bill Hunt

After Maile, Bill Hunt joined the state to discuss Making SEO Lemonade: Moving the Needle on Missed Opportunities. He tackled indexability, clickability, and other methods to find all those tiny errors that together cause big issues. Bill shared real examples of clients that saw amazing results once basic SEO errors were fixed.

Bill first discussed the importance of confirming index rates. Make it easy for Google to crawl your site.

“If Google knocks on 3 “doors” [links], and they all don’t open, why would they knock on a 4th door?”

Bill recommends maximizing XML site maps to offer a clear list of what you want Google to index.

HREFLANG is Crucial For International Sites

Bill gave a few examples of sites that didn’t have HREFLANG in place and faced deindexation and a huge loss in profiles. It’s important to align to the correct country using HREFLANG, which Bill spoke with us about in more detail at Pubcon [Watch the interview].

Don’t forget to map your HREFLANG tags. In many cases, the canonical tags are wrong, but these can be easily checked using a free tool like Bill’s HREFLANG validation checker.

Don’t Forget to Check Your Snippets

Optimize your snippets to get featured more in search and use the snippet optimization tool from Google.

Bill encouraged us to ask, Does snippet match user intent? Is the ranking page the PLP?

John Shehata

John Shehata, VP of SEO at Condé Nast, spoke on AMP Tactics from the Condé Nast SEO Team. John shares insights, advanced technical tips, and editorial tactics his team learned while implementing AMP for their major sites.

One of John’s specific examples was Wired, which translated its 20+ year history of articles from its website and magazine into AMP pages. Once found, they saw a 25% in CTR in search results, 63% increase in CTR on ads in AMP stories.

John stated that, “we are fighting a war against false traffic. You must work with ad partners that respect users.”

Strong Practices Build Trust

John used the example of toothbrushing.net to show a “scary site” — buying traffic with bots and not really providing value to the user. He stressed that common language is essential. Use search to see what the results look like and what people are searching for.

Glenn Gabe

Glenn’s presentation after lunch was What the Doctor Ordered: Your Yearly Google Algorithm Update Checkup (2016 Edition). Glenn gave us an overview of what is going on with Penguin, Panda, and Google’s Quality Updates (aka Phantom), as well as how they are impacting your SEO efforts now. Glenn showed us what each algorithm update is targeting, so you can avoid negative impact and increase rankings and traffic.

According to Glenn, Google pushes between 500-1000 changes every year. They first had an object oriented approach: craft algos and rolled them out separately. However, this caused significant movement all on one day.

Panda

Glenn stated that in the first Panda update, sites would lose 60-70% of organic search traffic overnight.Google doesn’t usually say when a new Panda cycle begins, but Glenn mentioned that Gary Illyes doesn’t view Panda as a penalty. Google’s purpose for Panda is to make sure content ranking highly can fulfill user expectations.

If you think you’ve been hit by Panda, Google gave 23 questions to answer questions if you were impacted on their Webmasters blog.

Penguin

First rolled out in April 2012, the Panda update targeted unnatural links and lead to a site-level demotion. With Penguin 4.0, there was a change from demotion to devaluing sites affected. Whereas Penguin 1.0 left the door open for negative SEO, 4.0 fixed that issue. However, questions still remain about using a disavow file.

Glenn also stated that a high percentage of spammy links with exact brand name anchor text could be affected by Penguin.

Finally, Glenn touched on the Google Mobile “popup algo” which was also mentioned by Maile at the beginning of the day. It is going to be rolled out on January 10, 2017.

Larry Kim

Larry’s presentation focused on Hacking Rankbrain. In the future, there is a good chance all of Google’s algorithms will be powered by machine learning. Larry elaborated on what this could mean for SEO and how can brands prepare.

In his research, Larry has found that post titles with longtail search terms have a 3% increase in post engagement & show up higher in SERPs.

Larry’s theory is this:

High CTR listings and long tail keyword ranks get more attention from Rankbrain.

That being said, Larry gave his tips on how SEOs can combat possible machine learning snafus.

Look at Your Organic CTR

Larry asked, What’s your organic CTR? To find it, go into search console, download query data under search analytics, download into excel, and then plot CTR versus average position plot. The middle line is expected CTR. Below the middle line, Larry calls them donkeys, above the middle line are unicorns.

Larry has found that if you can convert donkeys to unicorns, you get 6x more engagement on average.

To do this, you must improve your title tags. Avoid looking boring or spammy by making sure they aren’t basically dynamic keyword insertion for PPC. Larry recommends focusing on the format, content type, emotional hook, and topic to build viral content that gets a higher CTR.

To create a unicorn title, create titles that are different from your content competitors. He recommended looking at broad match data.

Broad match is the distant cousin of RankBrain learning.

When writing titles, remember that the same emotions that make people share things are the same things that cause a higher CTR.

Most content marketing strategies are sinking and traffic on a decline, but there’s no clear turnaround plan. No one knows what to do. Mark’s talk focused on actionable strategies to avoid this and to create a plan for progress.

The best articles get a high read time and high social activity. However, Mark states that most content gets neither.

One type of content Mark recommended was studies. Data-driven research studies WORK. Try creating studies as a content strategy to get links and exposure. He points out that creating studies that have results that go against expectations. This will generate more buzz, links, traffic.

To be successful, aim to be 10x better at your content than anyone else in your vertical. That being said, you must create content that makes people care about your brand. Know your brand identity and what uniqueness you bring to the content marketplace.

Finally, Mark stresses that all your strategies must work together: SEO, content, and a unified brand message across all channels.

Keesa Schreane

Keesa, Senior Manager, Marketing at Thomson Reuters, spoke on Inspired Marketing: How to Leverage Emotions in SEO. She provided insight into how brands can leverage knowledge of what drives your market, community and influencer engagement, and the power of momentum to improve your SEO.

Keesa kicked off her presentation by stating,

We desire association. People want to be part of a community.

As people, we desire that others are aware of our needs. People want to know, Do you understand me and my needs today? Can you predict what I’ll need in the future?

Keesa also stated that as people, we desire authenticity. To identify whether or not you are actually authentic with your customer, ask the following questions from their point of view:

As marketers, we must go beyond the sale and understand who your customers are. By demonstrating your awareness of customers’ environment, future challenges, and victories, they will begin to feel connected to your brand. By authentically appreciating customers and your relationships with them, you can build loyalty and engagement.

Kristan Bauer

Kristan Bauer is the Director of SEO for Zillow. She covered Grasping the “Why” Behind Local Search Search. Intent is elemental to local success. It’s important to understand how local communities search for your products can help sharpen your content creation and as a result drive your business forward.

Start With User Research

Kristan stated that Google found that consumers conduct 88% of local searches on smartphone and 84% on a computer/tablet.

When it comes to UGC, take topics and narrow them down to understand the search opportunities available. For instance, with Zillow, people are searching for schools in the areas they are considering buying a home in. Cash in on these opportunities by creating content that people are about, even though it’s not directly related to what you offer. (E.g. Zillow doesn’t show schools for sale or enrollment, but it knows that users are considering school districts when buying a home.)

Local Content is so Much More than SEO

Is your content scaleable? Kristan told us there’s a difference between content that should be scaled and content that shouldn’t. Different content formats can complete different goals (conversion, education, etc). Take a look at the above examples in the tweet to see what kind of content can be local content.

Ensure That Your Content is Discoverable

Consider the following to make sure your local content is as visible as possible:

Internal linking

XML sitemaps

Crawlable

Optimized SERP presence

Performance and page speed

Schema markup

Consider mobile first

Common mistakes in SEO when optimizing for local content:

Slow content

Not linked to

Isn’t relevant

Poor UX

Not mobile friendly

Content or links are loaded with client-side only

No coordination with other marketing channels

Once you have a strategy in place and launched, follow these steps to see if it made a difference:

Monitor For Impact

Benchmark pre-launch metrics

Monitor User engagement

Monitor traffic

Understand search terms

If we can provide users the best information along their search journey, this will lead to more brand engagement and traffic.

Patrick Kajirian

Patrick is the SEO Manager at ESPN. His session covered How ESPN Handled Their Big Site Migration. Patrick walked us through how ESPN planned and executed the domain migration from an SEO perspective, sharing key lessons and fundamentals that SEOs need to avoid common pitfalls and ensure minimum traffic loss.

Patrick kicked off his presentation by listing out the site migration benefits:

Migration Planning and Project Management

Patrick strongly stresses to meet with SEO and PM and engineering leads in early planning stages and regularly thereafter. He gave us a site migration to-do list to consider when working with these teams: